From President Trump's executive order to ban it and Microsoft's overtures to buy it, TikTok, the social media app launched by a Chinese company that's wildly popular with tweens and teens around the world, has been in the news frequently.
For some adults, the recent headlines may be their first and only exposure to TikTok.
For 13-year-old Cameron Tracy of Lambertville, her initial experience came in a more roundabout way in 2016, when her older sister told her about an app called Musical.ly, a short-form video-sharing platform based in Shanghai but popular in the United States and Europe.
"It was really cool and I downloaded it" to her iPod, Cameron said, to watch mostly comedy and funny videos. “I was an early adopter.”
In late 2017, Musical.ly was sold to the Beijing-based ByteDance and rebranded as TikTok. Less than a year later Cameron, by then a sixth-grader at Christ the King School in West Toledo, had TikTok on her cell phone to watch and share short dance videos, and even post some of her own videos through her private account, which now has more than 175 followers.
"Everyone on the app is so creative and a lot of people have different content, so I never get bored," she said. And with most videos being less than a minute long, "I don't have to wait around to get to the entertaining part."
The lure of TikTok has been especially tempting this summer during the pandemic. “I spend a little too much time on TikTok," Cameron said, approximately 90 minutes in total during the course of a day — such as between chores, or before a dance class, or while in the car.
Her mother, Michelle Tracy, 39, has noticed Cameron’s extra time on TikTok.
"I do have some concerns regarding the time that she's on there, but I think that's the same with every one of her friends," she said. "It's the generation they're in. Plus, with everything going on with COVID-19 now, there's not a lot of other outlets. With TikTok, they can see their friends and keep in touch with each other."
Otherwise, Mrs. Tracy hasn't seen any cause for alarm. In fact, she used to follow her daughters on TikTok when they first joined, but now simply performs a periodic spot check of the app on their phones.
"My concerns for them, as with any type of social media, was who are they talking to, what content are they posting, and what content are they viewing," she said. "I found that mostly everything they were posting were just for fun and entertainment purposes."
A native mobile app designed for mobile phone users, TikTok is an entertainment-oriented video app that delivers specific content based on algorithms or a user's own customized preferences, said Louisa Shu Ying Ha, a professor in media production and studies at Bowling Green State University.
"[It's] the short, more fun, and interactive version of YouTube," she said.
TikTok began in late September, 2016 as the Chinese app “Douyin,” which means “shaking sound,” Ms. Ha said, and its "short-form music video/lipsynching and dancing-along format, in 15 to 60 seconds, made it very fast-paced and very tempting to use."
Douyin was an immediate hit in China; it now has 400 million users, she said. TikTok, the U.S.-based brand of the app, has an estimated 100 million users in the United States and two billion users worldwide.
Based on her research, Ms. Ha said TikTok is most popular among teenagers younger than 18, appealing to their short attention span and cravings for "spontaneous entertainment."
"It becomes their habit to check what’s out there in TikTok every day," she said. "They may watch many videos without realizing how much time they have spent on it."
TikTok does have an age restriction: Users must by 13 years old to have full access to the app and its features, she said. A version of TikTok for children 12 and younger, though, allows younger users to create their own videos, but not to post their videos. It also restricts access to videos deemed inappropriate for children.
Ms. Ha cautions that it's not just TikTok that should concern parents.
"I would say all social media are not safe for kids under the age of 13,” she said. “People write and post all sorts of things and it is impossible to clean all of them up before someone see them. If parents allow children to use social media, they should educate them how to use them and protect themselves from predators and cyberbullies, revealing personal information as well as advise them what is inappropriate content."
The privacy of TikTok's users, particularly because so many of them are minors, has drawn concern from Republicans and Democrats. And in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said President Trump will "fix it."
"These Chinese software companies doing business the United States, whether it's TikTok or WeChat ... are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus. [It] could be their facial recognition pattern, it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they're connected to. President Trump has said enough and we're going to fix it and so he will take action in the coming days with respect to a broad array of national security risks that are presented by software connected to the Chinese Communist Party."
On Thursday, he did just that, ordering an unspecified ban on “transactions” with the Chinese owners of the consumer apps TikTok and WeChat. WeChat is also a Chinese-owned app that allows for messaging and mobile payments, with 1.2 billion users globally.
The twin executive orders — one for each app — were set to take effect in 45 days. They call on the Secretary of Commerce to define the banned transactions by that time.
Mr. Trump had threatened a deadline of Sept. 15 to “close down” TikTok unless Microsoft or “somebody else” bought it. TikTok, Microsoft, and WeChat owner Tencent gave no immediate replies to queries.
The President’s order cited legal authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act.
The Senate on Thursday also passed a measure that would prohibit the TikTok app on government-issued devices.
TikTok insists it does not store U.S. user information in China and would not share it with the Chinese government. WeChat also says it doesn’t share data with the Chinese government and never has, and does not store international user data in China.
As reported by the New York Times, Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok, with a deadline of Sept. 15, the date the President set for a nationwide ban if the company wasn't sold.
And while TikTok and social media platforms themselves aren't political, they can be politicized, said Radhika Gajjala, a professor of media and communication and of American culture studies at BGSU.
For example, India banned TikTok along with dozens of Chinese apps including WeChat following the death of 20 Indian soldiers in a clash with Chinese troops over a disputed border in the Himalayas, "thus politicizing TikTok in the context of India-China relations," Ms. Gajjala said.
In fact, the future of the video-sharing platform, best known for goofy dances, light comedy, and lively fun, may depend on how we think of TikTok: as a space for freedom of expression or as a technology product.
"If it’s primarily first and foremost a tech product — even if it supposedly facilitates freedom of expression in public space — in different ways I would say it’s absolutely possible to ban it," she said. "But it depends on the international trade agreements, laws, global business exchange histories, information technology policies nationally and internationally, and so much more.
"Suffice it to say for now," Ms. Gajjala added, "that the use of it does not have to be political but it often gets there.”
First Published August 7, 2020, 3:19 p.m.
